Friday, February 01, 2013

Maybe violent video games can be harmful. Maybe we should find out.

But today we know that a portion of every dollar spent on triple-A
military-themed video games flows into the pockets of small arms
manufacturers, either directly through licence payments, or indirectly
through advertising. These beneficiaries include Barrett in the US and
FN in France. They may include other controversial arms dealers, such as
Israel Weapon Industries, creator of the TAR-21, which appears in Call
of Duty. Such deals politicise video games in tangible yet hidden ways.
Consumers have, for the past few years, unwittingly funded arms
companies that often have their own military agendas.

When Wayne LaPierre took the stage on December 21 to deliver
the NRA’s response to the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, all I
wanted to hear from him was a little introspection. A little humility. I
wouldn’t have expected him to gnash his teeth, rend his garments, and renounce
his life’s work by calling for a blanket ban on all firearms. I just wanted to
hear an acknowledgement that, when such violent acts occur, we all need to take
a hard look at ourselves and ask what we can do to prevent them from happening
again.

That’s not what happened. Instead, I heard grandiose
statements that were indistinguishable from parody. The immortal line, “The
only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” sounded
like it might have been from the winning essay in the NRA’s Lil’ Patriots essay
contest, written by Wayne LaPierre, age 8. LaPierre’s case for the NRA was so
hideously self-defeating, so ugly and off-putting to all but the most ardent
pro-2A ideologues, one honestly might have believed that he was a double agent
working for the Brady Campaign.

Of course, as part of his attempt to exonerate America’s gun
culture from any culpability in firearm-related crime, LaPierre fingered video
games as the true culprit. And why not? These kids today, with their Mortal Kombat and their Night Trap, why, they’re nothing but
bloodthirsty savages, killing for the fun of it and fashioning sports coats
from their victims’ skin. Gamers were incensed. They denounced LaPierre for
daring to suggest that violent games could contribute to a culture that
glorifies violence. Just like him, they knew that they had done nothing wrong.
They knew someone else was to blame.

And so, for the past month, as the Vice President has
recommended a multifaceted approach to preventing gun violence that included
studying the effects of violent games, the drumbeat from self-pitying gamers
has been unceasing. Games aren’t the problem! Games don’t cause violence! We’re
the real victims here!

I’ve been reading this stuff non-stop, but what I haven’t
seen much of from my cohort is the same thing I wanted to see from Wayne
LaPierre. Introspection. Humility. An honest accounting of whether the culture
we are so much a part of might bear some responsibility for the latest in a
string of gun massacres, and whether we have any power to prevent the next one.
When someone asks if games are a factor, we are, in essence, plugging our ears
and shouting “NA NA NA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”

We participate in a culture that glorifies violence,
and a society that enables it. You can rage against this fact all you want, but
it doesn’t change it. Once, I read an article about traffic patterns, and
a quote in it has stuck with me. It was something like: “Everybody thinks
they’re in traffic. Nobody thinks
they are traffic.” Simple, but
profound. When you find yourself stuck in a traffic jam, rarely do you stop to
think that part of the reason the congestion exists in the first place is
because your car is on the road. The same is true of our culture. Like it or
not, by playing violent games, we are helping to sustain this culture. And, as Simon Parkin reported in the article linked at the top of this post, by buying violent games, we are enabling it.

Now, before we go any further, I want to stop and re-assure
you that we are most likely on the same side. I’m not advocating censorship of
our games, I don’t think Call of Duty
is training the next generation of thrill killers, and I‘d rather not gut the
First Amendment in order to preserve the Second. I suspect that untreated mental
health problems, access to guns, the social safety net, alcohol and drugs, child
abuse, and a million other things are likely to be greater drivers than video
games in the development of mass murderers. I’m after something more subtle,
here. I want to do the same thing I want LaPierre and his ilk to do: to look,
honestly and without agenda, at our pastime and its effects. I want to know
more about what effect the games I am playing are having on me, and what effect
they may have on my son.

To that end, I was intrigued when Kotaku’s Jason Schreier
dug up a treasure trove of studies that attempted to find a link
between gaming and violence. It’s fascinating reading, but ultimately
unsatisfactory, because all of the studies cited are measuring an immediate
aggression response to games, which is not the same thing. I didn’t need a
bunch of scientists to tell me that games can cause short-term adrenaline spikes – I’ve
got a bin full of shattered controllers to prove it.

But that’s beside the point. What’s at issue here is the
effect prolonged exposure to violent media has on the human mind, particularly
a developing one. If a long-term study has been done, I’m not aware of it. We
can all agree that playing a game of Grand Theft Auto won’t make a hitherto
peaceful person rev up the car and mow down a crowd of pedestrians. But can you
say for sure that a lifetime spent consuming violent media has no negative
effect on a person? Is it impossible or even unreasonable to wonder if too much
time spent playing violent games might hamper a kid’s emotional development?

Video games tend to favor swift, disproportionate responses
to obstacles, and almost always demand violent solutions to problems. They tend
to sort characters neatly into one of two categories, good or bad. A kid who learns most of what he knows about
making his way through life from playing games could very well grow to lack
empathy, be quick to embrace aggressive solutions to problems, and more apt to
view other people as antagonists. I’m not saying this is definitely the case.
I’m saying it sounds like a fair question, and a testable hypothesis.

It’s important to remember that we’re talking about
probability here. Obviously, playing violent video games does not, by itself,
cause people to kill other people, because millions of us do play violent video
games and have never even been in a fistfight. But saying so should not allow
us to elide the deeper question. Frankly, I am not convinced that playing
violent games can be ruled out as one of many contributing factors to violent
behavior, especially since so many of these spree killers do seem to have spent
a lot of time on the Xbox. What we need to know is what all of the risks are,
and to what extent each one contributes to the making of a murderer.

Look at it this way: smoking cigarettes is not a guarantee
that you will die of heart disease. Many people who don’t smoke will get heart
disease. Some people who do smoke will never get heart disease (many people,
actually). Yet it’s indisputably true that smoking cigarettes raises your risk
of getting heart disease. That’s what we don’t know the answer to: does playing
violent video games raise your risk
of committing a violent crime?

And if so, can we identify what that risk is,
and where it fits within a matrix of risk factors? In the same way that many
unhealthy living habits work together to cause heart disease, along with
genetics, so too could a variety of contributing factors cause someone to
commit a crime. If we know what those factors are, and how to weight them
against one another, then we’re closer to preventing them from happening at
all.

Besides which, as defenders of the realm, we’re in such a
rush to assure one another that video games don’t affect people that we end up
contradicting ourselves. When Senator Lamar Alexander said that violent video
games are a problem because “video games affect people,” he was roundly mocked from
the usual quarters. And yet it’s hardly controversial among gamers that games do affect us. We talk about games that
made us cry, games that made us think, games that made us feel guilty. More to
the point, every time a study comes out that suggests a possible benefit to
playing games, we fucking
trumpet that shit to the skies. (Even if it turns out not to be true.)

There’s more. Many of us believe in the educational potential
of games, whether through overtly educational software like newsgames or, more
obliquely, by learning how to strategize, prioritize, and think laterally in
order to accomplish objectives in even the least educational games. Steven
Johnson wrote an entire book that argued that video games, along with other
increasingly complex media, are making
the average person smarter. Whether or not any of this is true, I don’t
know for sure. (Intuitively, I do buy it -- the kind of strategic thinking
required to get through a game like XCOM
makes my head spin).But I do know that
I don’t typically read tweets calling people idiots for thinking games could
provide such benefits. Of course not -- because viewing games as a wholly
positive force doesn’t require us to contemplate a world in which they might
have to change at a fundamental level.

Of course there are witch hunters out there.
They’re the ones who tend to get the press -- and they’re also the ones with an
agenda. They want to shirk responsibility for tragedies like the one that
occurred in Newton. They exaggerate the possible dangers of games, using them as a way to deflect attention from that which they are struggling to protect. They’re wrong to do so, but their wrongnessdoesn’t give us the right to do the same
thing. I think we’re better than that.

Unfortunately, gamers, we’ve got something in common with
the NRA. We’re terrified of losing the thing that we love. Wayne
LaPierre’s
entire life is devoted to preserving unfettered gun rights at all costs,
and so
he lashes out like a cornered animal when it seems like that goal is in
danger.
So too do we dismiss anybody who dares to suggest that our pastime could
be
hiding potential dangers. Our reasons are purely selfish. If they come
for our games, what will we have left? We can't even imagine.

Yes, I want studies to be done. I want to know if violent
video games are a contributing factor to real-life violence. I don’t want that
research to come at the expense of exploring and treating other causes, but
studying violent media is a sensible part of a broader approach to diagnosing
and treating potential perpetrators of gun violence.

It’s win-win: if it can be proven that games have no deleterious
effect whatsoever, then it would be great to cross them off the list as we
continue to address the real problems. And if it turns out that there is a
definitive link, even a minor one, between consumption of violent media and
engaging in violent acts – hell, even if it can be proven that playing games
causes any neurological change -- I
want to know that too, for the same reason I’d want to know if there were
chemicals in my drinking water. Knowledge is a good thing. I’m not afraid of what we might find.

11 comments:

I think one of the most straightforward arguments that video games can't be having a big negative effect is that youth violence was dropping while they were on the rise. That said, that doesn't preclude the possibility of a slight negative effect or perhaps a large negative effect for a very small part of the population in interaction with particular types of games.

I have seen studies (well, to be honest, study summaries) that find correlation between prevalence of pornography and lower instances of sexual assault. So it isn't unthinkable that even crass simulated violence may, on the net, vent more than it encourages. However, that would just be a hypothesis when it comes to violent video games.

But I think being unafraid of knowledge is really the right way to go, thanks for writing this.

Side note: The Jason Schreier link is broken as of the time I'm viewing this.

Part of what animated my thinking about writing this is that I could see contradictory things being true: I could see games being beneficial for some people, and dangerous for others. That sounds completely plausible to me. Furthermore, knowing as I do that violent games haven't ruined my brain, I'm still troubled by the notion that they could be having an effect at all.

Last point: even if you think that games aren't the real problem, but the gun lobby is, which seems to be the prevalent view in my social circles then reading Parkin's article is especially troubling. If you think games are harmless, but part of your purchase is funding actual arms manufacturers, how do you square that circle?

(Almost all the links were broken! I guess Blogger doesn't like when you copy and paste from Word. They're fixed now.)

Great post, I've been thinking along the same lines for a while now. If you ask me though, neither guns nor games are the problem. I think they are both symptoms. I think the problem is this society's sick fascination with violence. It's almost a cult.

Here you have two groups accusing the other of promoting and causing violence, where on the one hand you have one group of people uncompromisingly defending devices the purpose of which is the ending of life, and on the other hand a group defending a medium that glorifies headshots, gore and torture. It sounds rather disingenuous when gamers point back at gun owners when they have no problem having guns in their games. You know, if you have a problem with guns... you have a problem with guns. Period.

I totally agree with you that closing your mind and refusing to even look for evidence before making a decision is a bad call. More research and more knowledge are never a bad thing, even if what you end up finding out is painful or scary. It's still better than not knowing or hanging blindly to your assumptions.

I think your description of gamer behavior could be applied to Americans generally. It seems that we culturally like to cast people into monochromatic savior/antagonist roles, want quick straightforward solutions even when the problem is complex, and tend to threaten a lot of violence. If our culture is like that, we'll tend to produce media that reinforce that, which will make our culture even more like that. That would be a super interesting study.

This is a great post. Concerning the effects of games, if we base ourselves on Ralph Koster's "Theory of Fun" games are about learning patterns. It is not a coincidence if in game design we talk about learning curves for games.This implies that any game will teach us something according to the way the mechanics are crafted and the emergent dynamics and aesthetics.

That brings me to the first problem : video games are a medium. Every game has different mechanics.We cannot then defend or attack the medium as a whole. Journey on one side vehicles a whole spectrum of emotions that is completely different from Call of Duty.

What we can say is that games influence us. That is the case with every art form : painting, music, books, etc.So it all depends on how the game is crafted, what it wants to teach the player, how it teaches them.

The second problem is the accessibility of violent games : no kid should be able to play Call of Duty, Battlefield, and countless other violent games until he has reached a maturity of mind where he will not learn from them a more aggressive logic.

@Julian : That's actually what Michael Moore did in his film "Bowling for Columbine", even if he does have a political agenda in mind behind it.

Interestingly, I don't see a lot of discussion about what defines a "violent video game." Call of Duty, everyone agrees on. What about Duck Hunt? What about Smash TV, or Berzerk? Is there some sort of crossover point where the game becomes "realistic enough" to be worthy of the "violent video game" discussion? I continue to make the argument, though nobody seems to like it, that kids raised on games don't make a distinction - a game is a game, reality is reality.

While more science is always good, the thing I find problematic is that there isn't actually much contention in academia about whether or not games actually cause violent behaviour. Aside from academics whose studies were funded by some group with "Family" in their name (and were basically just fishing anything that vaguely resembled an already assumed conclusion), there really isn't much dispute.

Probably the foremost researcher on this is Professor Chris Ferguson at Texas A&M. He gave a pretty good rundown of the science as it stands here (and there's a bonus Steve Gaynor on there too!). There have been longitudinal studies and there just isn't any evidence. And you can't prove a negative, right? Like we can keep looking, but the best it'll ever be is, "Nope, there's still no evidence."

So more money for more science? That's great, it's just I don't see the LaPierres and his ilk being convinced by any amount of data. I'd rather see those funds go toward something that is more poorly understood as potential factor in violent behaviour.

First it was rock and roll, then comic books, then heavy metal, then D&D and now video games. I think at this point we realize the notion that all those previous things fostering violent behaviour is preposterous. Are games the exception? Maybe, but there just ain't any evidence for it and if there was, it would be the first scapegoat that was actually culpable.

What I do find really problematic is the depiction of realistic in violence in games vis-a-vis actual conflict. Does playing a mountain of Call of Duty make one more hawkish with regard to intervention policy and other "sanctioned" forms of violence? When Price Harry says shooting Taliban from Apache is akin to Playstation time, that's kind of worrying. I'm not aware that there's much, if any, data on that and certainly that would be interesting to understand better.

There is definitely a point at which you'd have to stop looking. I'm not sure we're there yet. (By contrast, the science seems clear that, say, having guns in your home makes you more likely to die of a gunshot wound.) Without having listened to all of the piece you linked, Nels, I have to wonder who's done studies of this kind of media consumption over a span of years, even decades.

But even during the intro, they're talking about a guy who uses games for therapeutic purposes. And electronic simulations have been used for training in tons of fields for decades now. So... why is that we can use games to train and cure people, but it's impossible that they might also be conditioning them in ways we don't want?

I don't mean to detract from the discussion, and I think I mostly agree with your post, but I would like to ask how you envisage that the long-term connection between games and violence be studied? Short-term is easy because you can set up an experiment. Long-term implies a massive observational study.

The group 'people who play video games' and 'people who commit acts of violence' are problematic to correlate/study. The former is huge and growing by the year. The latter is (thankfully) tiny and shrinking (violent crime rates are almost universally falling), but likely to significantly overlap with the former.

I guess you could, with a large enough sample size, show that the proportion of violent offenders among gamers is higher/lower/ not different than a randomly chosen, age, sex and whatever else matched control non-gamer group.